Download The Insufficiency of Honesty

THE INSUFFICIENCY OF HONESTY
Stephen L. Carter (Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1996, p.74-76)
A couple of years ago I began a university commencement address by telling the audience that I was
going to talk about integrity. The crowd broke into applause. Applause! Just because they had heard
the word "integrity;" that's how starved for it they were. They had no idea how I was using the word,
or what I was going to say about integrity, or, indeed, whether I was for it or against it. But they
knew they liked the idea of talking about it.
Very well, let us consider this word "integrity." Integrity is like the weather: everybody talks
about it but nobody knows what to do about it. Integrity is that stuff that we always want more of.
Some say that we need to return to the good old days when we had a lot more of it. Others say that
we as a nation have never really had enough of it. Hardly anybody stops to explain exactly what we
mean by it, or how we know it is a good thing, or why everybody needs to have the same amount of
it. Indeed, the only trouble with integrity is that everybody who uses the word seems to mean
something slightly different.
For instance, when I refer to integrity, do I mean simply "honesty"? The answer is no; although
honesty is a virtue of importance, it is a different virtue from integrity. Let us, for simplicity, think
of honesty as not lying; and let us further accept Sissela Bok's definition of a lie: "any intentionally
deceptive message which is stated." Plainly, one cannot have integrity without being honest
(although, as we shall see, the matter gets complicated), but one can certainly be honest and yet have
little integrity.
When I refer to integrity, I have something very specific in mind. Integrity, as I will use the
term, requires three steps: discerning what is right and what is wrong; acting on what you have
discerned, even at personal cost; and saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of
right and wrong. The first criterion captures the idea that integrity requires a degree of moral
reflectiveness. The second brings in the ideal of a person of integrity as steadfast, a quality that
includes keeping one's commitments. The third reminds us that a person of integrity can be trusted.
The first point to understand about the difference between honesty and integrity is that a person
may be entirely honest without ever engaging in the hard work of discernment that integrity
requires: she may tell us quite truthfully what she believes without ever taking the time to figure out
whether what she believes is good and right and true. The problem may be as simple as someone's
foolishly saying something that hurts a friend's feelings; a few moments of thought would have
revealed the likelihood of the hurt and the lack of necessity for the comment. Or the problem may be
more complex, as when a man who was raised from birth in a society that preaches racism states his
belief in one race's inferiority as a fact, without ever really considering that perhaps this deeply held
view is wrong. Certainly the racist is being honest - he is telling us what he actually thinks - but his
honesty does not add up to integrity.
TELLING EVERYTHING YOU KNOW
A wonderful epigram sometimes attributed to the filmmaker Sam Goldwyn goes like this: "The
most important thing in acting is honesty; once you learn to fake that, you're in." The point is that
honesty can be something one seems to have. Without integrity, what passes for honesty often is
nothing of the kind; it is fake honesty or it is honest but irrelevant and perhaps even immoral.
Consider an example. A man who has been married for fifty years confesses to his wife on his
deathbed that he was unfaithful thirty-five years earlier. The dishonesty was killing his spirit, he
says. Now he has cleared his conscience and is able to die in peace.
The husband has been honest - sort of. He has certainly unburdened himself. And he has
probably made his wife (soon to be his widow) quite miserable in the process, because even if she
forgives him, she will not be able to remember him with quite the vivid image of love and loyalty
that she had hoped for. Arranging his own emotional affairs to ease his transition to death, he has
shifted to his wife the burden of confusion and pain, perhaps for the rest of her life. Moreover, he
has attempted his honesty at the one time in his life when it carries no risk; acting in accordance
with what you think is right and risking no loss in the process is a rather thin and unadmirable form
of honesty.
Besides, even though the husband has been honest in a sense, he has now twice been unfaithful
to his wife: once thirty-five years ago, when he had his affair, and again when, nearing death, he decided that his own peace of mind was more important than hers. In trying to be honest he has violated his marriage vow by acting toward his wife not with love but with naked and perhaps even cruel
self-interest.
As my mother used to say, you don't have to tell people everything you know. Lying and nondisclosure, as the law often recognizes, are not the same thing. Sometimes it is actually illegal to tell
what you know, as, for example, in the disclosure of certain financial information by market
insiders. Or it may be unethical, as when a lawyer reveals a confidence entrusted to her by a client. It
may be simple bad manners, as in the case of a gratuitous comment to a colleague on his or her
attire. And it may be subject to religious punishment, as when a Roman Catholic priest breaks the
seal of the confessional - an offense that carries automatic excommunication.
In all the cases just mentioned, the problem with telling everything you know is that somebody
else is harmed. Harm may not be the intention, but it is certainly the effect. Honesty is most laudable
when we risk harm to ourselves; it becomes a good deal less so if we instead risk harm to others
when there is no gain to anyone other than ourselves. Integrity may counsel keeping our secrets in
order to spare the feelings of others. Sometimes, as in the example of the wayward husband, the
reason we want to tell what we know is precisely to shift our pain onto somebody else - a course of
action dictated less by integrity than by self-interest. Fortunately, integrity and self-interest often
coincide, as when a politician of integrity is rewarded with our votes. But often they do not, and it is
at those moments that our integrity is truly tested.
ERROR
Another reason that honesty alone is no substitute for integrity is that if forthrightness is not
preceded by discernment, it may result in the expression of an incorrect moral judgment. In other
words, I may he honest about what I believe, but if I have never tested my beliefs, I may be wrong.
And here I mean "wrong" in a particular sense: the proposition in question is wrong if I would
change my mind about it after hard moral reflection.
Consider this example. Having been taught all his life that women are not as smart as men, a
manager gives the women on his staff less-challenging assignments than he gives the men. He does
this, he believes, for their own benefit: he does not want them to fail, and he believes that they will
if he gives them tougher assignments. Moreover, when one of the women on his staff does poor
work, he does not berate her as harshly as he would a man, because he expects nothing more. And
he claims to be acting with integrity because he is acting according to his own deepest beliefs.
The manager fails the most basic test of integrity. The question is not whether his actions are
consistent with what he most deeply believes, but whether he has done the hard work of discerning
whether what he most deeply believes is right. The manager has not taken this harder step.
Moreover, even within the universe that the manager has constructed for himself, he is not
acting with integrity. Although he is obviously wrong to think that the women on his staff are not as
good as the men, even were he right, that would not justify applying different standards to their
work. By so doing he betrays both his obligation to the institution that employs him and his duty as
a manager to evaluate his employees.
The problem that the manager faces is an enormous one in our practical politics, where having
the dialogue that makes democracy work can seem impossible because of our tendency to cling to
our views even when we have not examined them. As Jean Bethke Elshtain has said, borrowing
from John Courtney Murray, our politics are so fractured and contentious that we often cannot even
reach disagreement. Our refusal to look closely at our own most cherished principles is surely a
large part of the reason. Socrates thought the unexamined life not worth living. But the unhappy
truth is that few of us actually have the time for constant reflection on our views - on public or
private morality. Examine them we must, however, or we will never know whether we might be
wrong.
None of this should be taken to mean that integrity as I have described it presupposes a single
correct truth. If, for example, your integrity-guided search tells you that affirmative action is wrong,
and my integrity-guided search tells me that affirmative action is right, we need not conclude that
one of us lacks integrity. As it happens, I believe, both as a Christian and as a secular citizen who
struggles toward moral understanding, that we can find true and sound answers to our moral
questions. But I do not pretend to have found very many of them, nor is an exposition of them my
purpose here.
It is the case not that there aren't any right answers but that, given human fallibility, we need to
be careful in assuming that we have found them. However, today's political talk about how it is
wrong for the government to impose one person's morality on somebody else is just mindless
chatter. Every law imposes one person's morality on somebody else, because law has only two
functions: to tell people to do what they would rather not or to forbid them to do what they would.
And if the surveys can be believed, there is far more moral agreement in America than we
sometimes allow ourselves to think. One of the reasons that character education for young people
makes so much sense to so many people is precisely that there seems to be a core set of moral
understandings - we might call them the American Core - that most of us accept. Some of the
virtues in this American Core are, one hopes, relatively noncontroversial. About 500 American
communities have signed on to Michael Josephson's program to emphasize the "six pillars" of good
character: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, caring, fairness, and citizenship. These virtues
might lead to a similarly noncontroversial set of political values: having an honest regard for
ourselves and others, protecting freedom of thought and religious belief, and refusing to steal or
murder.
HONESTY AND COMPETING RESPONSIBILITIES
A further problem with too great an exaltation of honesty is that it may allow us to escape
responsibilities that morality bids us bear. If honesty is substituted for integrity, one might think that
if I say I am not planning to fulfill a duty, I need not fulfill it. But it would be a peculiar morality
indeed that granted us the right to avoid our moral responsibilities simply by stating our intention to
ignore them. Integrity does not permit such an easy escape.
Consider an example. Before engaging in sex with a woman, her lover tells her that if she gets
pregnant, it is her problem, not his. She says that she understands. In due course she does wind up
pregnant. If we believe, as I hope we do, that the man would ordinarily have a moral responsibility
toward both the child he will have helped to bring into the world and the child's mother, then his
honest statement of what he intends does not spare him that responsibility.
This vision of responsibility assumes that not all moral obligations stem from consent or from
a stated intention. The linking of obligations to promises is a rather modern and perhaps uniquely
Western way of looking at life, and perhaps a luxury that only the well-to-do can afford. As Fred
and Shulamit Korn (a philosopher and an anthropologist) have pointed out, "If one looks at
ethnographic accounts of other societies, one finds that, while obligations everywhere play a crucial
role in social life, promising is not preeminent among the sources of obligation and is not even
mentioned by most anthropologists." The Korns have made a study of Tonga, where promises are
virtually unknown but the social order is remarkably stable. If life without any promises seems
extreme, we Americans sometimes go too far the other way, parsing not only our contracts but even
our marriage vows in order to discover the absolute minimum obligation that we have to others as a
result of our promises.
That some societies in the world have worked out evidently functional structures of obligation
without the need for promise or consent does not tell us what we should do. But it serves as a
reminder of the basic proposition that our existence in civil society creates a set of mutual responsibilities that philosophers used to capture in the fiction of the social contract. Nowadays, here in
America, people seem to spend their time thinking of even cleverer ways to avoid their obligations,
instead of doing what integrity commands and fulfilling them. And all too often honesty is their
excuse.